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MyPlanLink Quoting and Payments

Client: United Healthcare, Aetna, Blue Cross, and more

Date: July 2015 - January 2016

Application:
MyPlanLink Quoting

Project Description

MyPlanLink is a marketplace platform for health insurance providers (aka providers for short) that offers their customers a branded experience to shop, quote, compare, and enroll in a variety of health, dental, and vision products.

The goal was to build a set of web services that this platform could flexibly and safely pass customer enrollment and payment information to which could then submit it to the health insurance providers. This included:

Tokenization of payment information

Reception of enrollment from the platform

Transformation from received enrollment into providers’ formats

Submission of enrollments and payment information to providers’

Contributions

Out of a team of developers, my primary contributions were:

Payment tokenization and ecryption

Test harness for tokenization

Submission of enrollments to providers

Challenges Overcame

This was my first experience building something that tokenized and encrypted actual payment information which was a high-security, business-critical task. This involved a variety of encryption techniques and software to accomplish.

The biggest challenge was scalability. For n number of health insurance providers, there can be n number of enrollment submission methods that they themselves require to receive the enrollment, such as:

E-fax of PDF enrollments

Token-protected web APIs with enrollment as custom-formatted in JSON

.NET SOAP web services protected with encryption and public keys

PDFs sent via FTP for manual processing

Accomplishments

This was a brand new business venture and a new concept in the development of the federal and state-run marketplaces for the Affordable Healthcare Act.

The skills I developed most were:

Web service security techniques and standards

Scalability

Service-oriented architecture focus

Encryption and tokenization

Working with clients’ technical teams directly

Skills Used

Languages

PHP

SQL

XML

SOAP XML

JavaScript

JSON

ASP.NET

Concepts

Asymmetric Cryptography

Encryption

SOAP Services

REST APIs

Payment Tokenization

Scalability

Tools

Git

Postman

SoapUI

CyberArk

PDFLib

Visual Studio

Stack

Linux

Apache

MySQL

PHP

Beazley Enrollment Platform

Client: Beazley

Date: Nov 2014 - May 2015

Application:
Beazley Group Portal

Project Description

Beazley had a group enrollment platform where the companies could only enroll one employee at a time using a wizard-based flow.

The task on this project was to overhaul it to facilitate real-time mass-employee enrolling. We were tasked to:

Allowed bulk, asynchronous adds/changes of employees and coverages

Integrate into the existing Beazley Employer Portal that their groups use

Ensure fast performance and real-time enrollment processing

Contributions

I worked on a team of developers that worked directly with the business unit as well as the middleware teams who provided the real-time enrollment processing web services.

Some of the tasks we split up amongst ourselves were:

Design interactive jQuery UI allowing adds/changes to be done on one screen

Submit enrollments to a backend Java/WMB XML web service using AJAX

Add real-time status tracking of new enrollments and changes

On top of these design & development tasks, I took on the job of predicting, organizing, and estimating every task we all had to do to ship the product.

Challenges Overcame

This project was the biggest undertaking I had to date in terms of cross-team coordination due to all the Java technology being leveraged:

Accomplishments

The greatest accomplishment of this project was that our system saves the insured companies/groups dozens of hours every enrollment period, reducing their frustration and increasing their satisfaction as Beazley customers.

Project Description

A good half of the states under the Affordable Healthcare Act have elected to run their own state-based marketplaces instead.

The payment portal was initially designed around the strict standards of that Federal Marketplace, which state-based marketplaces do not have to follow.

To scale the payment portal to any number of state-based marketplaces, it had to:

Accept any request type, not just Healthcare.gov-formatted SAML XML

Configure client-specific features and customizations

Send any response type, not just Healthcare.gov-formatted POST response

Support any type of request-level security, eg:

Restful POST request tokens

Signed SAML

SOAP encryption

Contributions

This project consisted of two senior developers: myself, and another who was in charge of a different state marketplace.

Together, we crafted the solutions that allowed this payment portal to scale to any number of state marketplaces.

We wrapped the application with configurable pre and post processors, which were in charge of the request/response handling, security, and application-level configurations.

Test harnesses were also created to simulate the state marketplaces where the users would be coming from to submit payments.

Challenges Overcame

This project was a tidal wave of advanced concepts and technologies that I have only been previously exposed to minimally.

I have to seriously step my game up in the areas of cryptography, SOAP web services, and SAML processing, and learned a lot of new tools in the process.

Accomplishments

The payment portal was already highly successful, processing payments in the federal marketplace, which is roughly half of the states in the U.S.

By upgrading this application to flexibly scale to any number of state-based marketplaces, Healthplan Services is able to tap into the markets of the other half of the U.S, which all have state-based marketplaces of some kind.

Skills Used

Languages

PHP

SQL

SAML XML

Concepts

Single Sign-On

Asymmetric Cryptography

Encryption

SOAP Services

REST APIs

Design Patterns

Tools

Ping Federate

Git

Postman

SoapUI

CyberArk

CyberSource

Stack

Linux

Apache

MySQL

PHP

Policy Change Quoting

Client: Cigna, Florida Blue, Blue Shield, Coventry, Aetna

Date: 2013 - 2016

Application:
Policy Change Quoting

Project Description

A quoting web application was needed by sales representatives to calculate new premiums for changes against the existing policies of members calling in, such as:

Add new dependents

Move to new address

Add or change plans

Contributions

I worked on a team of three developers that worked directly with the business unit and policy rating teams to gather requirements and brainstorm how to overcome issues in the existing policy quoting applications used by Cigna and Coventry at the time.

The design phase concluded with a 20-page high level design document outlining:

Problems with existing in-force quoting applications

Business solutions to those problems

System changes

Hierarchy of system controllers and views

Navigation

Error handling

Design of each step in quoting process, including flow diagrams

Overview of business features in each step in quoting process

My contributions during the development phase consisted of writing or co-writing:

System-level models and controllers

Preprocessor that gathers:

Policy-level & tier information

Employee & dependent information

Benefits & plans

Billing & premium data

Module-specific views, controllers, and service controllers

Error Handling

Challenges Overcame

This was my first enterprise-level web application built from the ground up.

Scalability was the toughest challenge to overcome. This application effectively consolidated all other policy-change quoting applications before it, and in their place, provided a single, scalable solution.

It had to allow the following features to be configurable for any number of health insurance carriers:

Policy setups

Coverage setups

Benefit structures

Policy Rating engines and algorithms

Business rules

Accomplishments

This quoting application is still in use today and continues to be a great asset. It has grown to provide policy change quoting for the following health insurance carriers:

Coventry

Cigna

Florida Blue

Blue Shield

Aetna

It has grown to quote 500,000 premiums on 40,000 policies per year currently.

Skills Used

Languages

PHP

SQL

HTML/CSS

JavaScript

XML

Concepts

MVC

AJAX

Caching

Web Services

Design Patterns

UI/UX

Reusability

Scalability

Tools

MVC Framework

jQuery

Dimensions (VCS)

Postman

Stack

Linux

Apache

MySQL

PHP

DB2

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Client: AVMA

Date: 2012

Applications:
Agent, Quoting & Member Portals

Project Description

AVMA has a multi-user site for agents, students, and members that allows all three to run insurance quotes:

Agent Portal - Agents sell policies, run quotes, and manage sales

Student Portal - Students view coverage, make payments, and get quotes

Member Portal - Members view coverage, make payments, and get quotes

Contributions

My work with AVMA’s portals in 2012 were driven largely by new feature requests: